Presto Change-O

I am now almost fully back to Durham. I have spent over a week here and interviewed three times, with a phone interview Tuesday evening. Five months away from Jami has been difficult, even when visits are two weeks apart. This last week has been heavenly. I am now flying back to Decatur where I'll finish packing the house and studio. One last shuffle board at Twain's; one last visit to Birmingham - to deliver the Shirley Gutherie painting to Cary Speaker. Cary will hang the painting, a fine expressionist image of a great reformed theologian, in his church at Mountain Brook. I'll see Shannon Webster there and hopefully we'll share a pint somewhere. Then I'm back to our house (which we'll rent if it doesn't sell in the next week).
Here are pictures I like. Jami drinking tea at a cafe in Jackson, WY and a view of the Grand Tetons from Gros Ventes (pronounced "growVaunts"). Tetons means breasts and Gros Ventes means belly - breasts and bellies: what were those French fur trappers thinking?
I hope to see friends and family in Decatur.

Moving into the new place

We have a new place. Jami found us an apartment surrounded by Duke Forest. The apartment is as big as our house, but it is laid out differently - in our house (which we're selling) you can get to any room via a central hallway (almost a circular layout); the apartment is laid out linearly - you have to walk back through the living room to get to the bedroom or study. I like the apartment. It is surrounded by quiet woodlands. As Jami said: there are no buses and cars and people. But we do miss being three blocks down from our church. It's unlikely that we'll find a church like Oakhurst in Durham. We like living in a neighborhood near stores and parks, but we'll try this for a while.
Of course I couldn't stay up there (not yet). I drove back to Atlanta to return the rental car. I drove in the rain all the way. All the way I listened to satellite radio's NPR and BBCAmerica stations. There's something comforting about listening to people have reasoned conversations as I drive. I remember when I lived in New Mexico: I would be driving at night, 90 miles between towns and absolutely nothing in between, and listening to people have conversations about aliens and paraphenomina. I know that that doesn't sound reasonable - but this was reasonable for New Mexico, and it was entertaining. CS Lewis once remarked about Charles Williams (a Christian writer of occult romances) that you sometimes forget about how peculiar another human being can be underneath appearances of respectability. Hearing people talk about anal probes and ESP, normal people, people who if you saw them on the street you'd say, "there's a normal person, clean cut, well dressed, not over eating and exercising, probably possessed of moderate political opinions and believing that Church shouldn't interfere in the state and vice versa," gives me insight into the the weirdness that is humanity. Take any person, no matter how rationalistic they might seem, and at some point, I believe that you'll find the numinous center, that place that they may not admit to themselves (much less anyone else), but a place of unfounded belief - that is belief that relies on personal experience, is unverifiable and non-duplicable, but is nevertheless a belief in something other, something strange, something unknowable. For some people this center is nearer the surface; for some people this center pokes out. This center doesn't necessarily express itself in religion. Religion may cloak this center in fact - especially where religion is considered a social norm.
I find drives such as this, 370 miles, SUV chugging along at 19 mpg, with a mild drizzle to light rain, to be wonderful for thinking, conducive to the creative juices; indeed, the car becomes my monastic cell, a vehicle of prayer and meditation. The broken white lines become the beads of a rosary. Each intersection is a cross.
I made it back to Atlanta, dropped off the car, and took MARTA back to Decatur. I'm back in our now catless near empty house and I can't wait until I'm able to make it back to Durham - the place that I increasingly feel like is home, the place where the most wonderful woman in the world lives.

No Place like Heimat

Yes,I went on a bit of a rant (a rantlit) about the quorum and what an inconvenience it is; I was a bit sarcastic about members motivations for effecting this deficit; and I impugned their character: a full scale ad hominem attack. In the South we call that an add hominy attack.

Above is a photo of the house Lurilene was born in and lived in until recently. It replaced one of those houses with the columns, the moonlight and the magnolia, after it burned down ca 1917. This house is still there, on land that the family had lived on since 1867. Of course, now it's surrounded by a subdivision: hundreds of cookie cutter houses resembling monopoly pieces stacked on sidewalkless winding streets, each in yards with spindly trees that might produce shade in 15 years or so.

The house we're leaving now, here in Oakhurst, is not quite that storied, but for us, it is the house we were married in, the house we spent our first months together in, and the first house Jami bought. Now we say farewell to our modest 1100 sq ft domicile. Hopefully it will sell to a person or couple who wants to live here and fix it up further. We'd like to think it's not just another tear-down, like those that are already dotting Decatur and Atlanta.

Tonight we ate sushi at Nikemotos, and as we left, we looked up at the Atlanta skyline and remarked how this view won't occur in Durham. I said that 20 years ago this view wasn't here either. When I was a child, the blue domed Polaris restaurant was the most significant building on the Atlanta skyline. Now, when you're riding into town on MARTA you can see the Polaris, the Hyatt, and it's surrounded by other buildings. When I was a child, growing up in the country, I had classmates who would go into town. They would proudly recount their experiences: they rode the Pink Pig at Riches at Christmas and they ate at the Polaris. They is really a little girl named Tammy, God knows what happened to her - but I remember her as being the queen of elementary school. She had sung on an album with her church choir - now I am wondering, "what did happen to her?" By high school I think she was still around, but we never heard from her. I guess you've got to be careful not to peak in elementary school. You've also got to be careful not to peak in high school. It's also good if you can avoid peaking in college and grad school. Actually it's best if you can still be working toward your best years when you're in your 50s and 60s. I hope that I'm still swinging at 90. I believe that Neill Young's "better to burn out than to fade away" is a false dilemma and that we need neither burn out or fade away. Perhaps it's possible to be the best we can be at any given moment.

Now it's back to Durham. But first the Beach.

Around Duke

Last summer Jami and I visited friends in Durham. Paul, pictured with Jami in the middle photo, toured us around the campus, showing us the new things that had been constructed with the library and the divinity school. The top two photos are of a bistro attached to the library, and the bottom photo is a new chapel in the divinity school. In the background, in front of the piano, you see Jami, with her large pink handbag that she bought at a yard sale here in Decatur for two dollars.
What impressed me about both spaces was how airy they are. Light from outside fills them, and the abundance of windows allows me to feel like I'm in nature. The chapel's space has a great freedom in it. Behind the pulpit I don't experience the widening gulf between myself and the congregation that's typical of most church architecture. It's a space that combines formal elements (Gothic patterns of building common to Duke, the organ ranks, the pulpit/congregation split) with intimacy. Last summer I thought, "what would it be like to have coffee here? What would it be like to preach here?"
I remembered how 17 years ago I had lived in Chapel Hill, finishing my Library Science degree. I remembered that just as I had finished my coursework and had begun writing my thesis my mother died. How disoriented I was when I left this place to move back to Georgia.
When I was six, in my first year of school, a big headed skinny kid with horn-rimmed glasses, I remember thinking how far away graduation seemed: twelve years - that's forever. Now I'm throwing up decades and twelve years, much less seventeen years, don't seem like much at all.
Jami and I marvel that we both lived in the Chapel Hill/Durham area around the same time. She lived there longer than I did, but we both left in 1990. We never met, or we're not conscious of meeting, in the years we were there. Perhaps I cut her off in traffic; Perhaps she glanced at me as I visited friends at Duke and thought, "what an odd fellow" - if as much as that.
What would it be like to live there again? In 17 years Durham's not the same place. Neighborhoods have gentrified; the Durham Bulls play in a new ballpark for a different major league team; the basket ball universe has altered, if slightly. But there are continuities: our friends who live there came to our wedding; Carolina bar-b-que is still superlative (although Georgia Brunswick stew continues to be better - why is that?) and abundant; and the place is awash in culture: the universities, libraries, museums, music and theater venues.
Atlanta is a dear place to us. Our families are nearby. We've tons of friends here and a very supportive church. And Atlanta hops with culture too, even more so - it's just a big sprawling place that's really a bunch of little places butting up against each other. And we're comfortable in our little place here in Decatur. We've got our creek outside (it's called something like Peace and Love creek, and now its course is fixed in a concrete bed - but its gentle curve under the trees behind us is beautiful, bucolic) and we walk to church. The seminary's five minutes away. The Midtown movie theater is 20 minutes driving, and the Tara, with Varsity chili dogs waiting across the street, is about 20 minutes as well.
I like having lunch with my friends: going to Twain's and playing shuffleboard with Bob as we down copious diet coke and wings and nachos; talking sermons with Joe and trying new beers. It's a joy to go with Jami to a major league game, even if the Braves are disappointing.
Two months ago, Jami and I went to a game, and as we crossed the bridge over I-20, she looked at me and said, "isn't it nice, just the two of us with the kids out of the house." Yes, we decided then, we're like some couple that's discovering each other once the kids have left.